Elbert Guillory, a Democratic state senator in Louisiana, recently made headlines when he announced he was now Elbert Guillory,Republican state senator in Louisiana, in the process becoming the state’s first African American Republican lawmaker since Reconstruction. This week, Guillory released a video explaining his party switch, which he says is rooted in the GOP’s anti-slavery foundations.

“In recent history, the Democratic Party has created the illusion that their agenda and their policies are what’s best for black people,” Guillory said over plaintive piano. “Somehow it’s been forgotten that the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement with one simple creed: that slavery is a violation of the rights of man.”

“It was Republicans in Congress who authored the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, giving former slaves citizenship, voting rights and due process of law. The Democrats on the other hand were the party of Jim Crow. It was Democrats who defended the rights of slave owners.”

Guillory contrasted this 150-year-old version of the Republican Party with his interpretation of contemporary left wing politics.

“At the heart of liberalism is the idea that only a great and powerful big government can be the benefactor of social justice for all Americans. But the left is only concerned with one thing: control. And they disguise this control as one thing: charity. Programs such as welfare, food stamps? These programs aren’t designed to lift black Americans out of poverty. They were always intended as a mechanism for politicians to control the black community. The idea that blacks, or anyone for that matter, need the government to get ahead in life is despicable.

“And even more important, this idea is a failure. Our communities are just as poor as they have always been. Our schools continue to fail children. Our prisons are filled with young black men who should be at home, being gathers. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers, who control us by making us dependent on them.”

Guillory also said that “freedom” meant a free press, and “the idea that the emails and phone records should remain free from government search and seizure.”

“To be truly free,” Guillory said, “is to rely on no one other than the author of our destiny. These are the ideas at the core of the Republican Party, and it is why I am a Republican.”

Guillory finished by enclosing Martin Luther King, Jr., in the ranks of the Republican Party, a move that is questionable at best.

“Please join with me in abandoning the government plantation and the party of disappointment,” he said, “so that we may all echo the words of one Republican leader who famously said, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank god almighty, we are free at last.’”